Punish 'Goldilocks' For Entering Bears' House?

July 19, 1986|By Ellen Goodman, Washington Post Writers Group

BOSTON — In one way or another, the public schools always have been teaching math to society. It's the schools that tried to find a common denominator for all the fractions of society, to make a whole out of the sum of our children.

This math has been a controversial subject. My immigrant grandparents, like others, turned their sons over to a school system that was dedicated to wiping the Old World imprint off their young. They were ''brainwashed'' into becoming Americans.

I do not know how my grandparents felt about this. Probably mixed. But I know that more than once, more than a dozen times, the values taught in my public school, and then in my daughter's, conflicted with what we were taught at home.

My teachers and parents did not always mark the same answers as correct. Homework sometimes included a family debate over the lessons. Out of this conflict, I learned that adults disagree, and learned how to live in a pluralistic society.

Now in Tennessee, 12 parents are again wrestling with the public school system for control of the information delivered to their children. This time, in a Greenville courtroom, they have sued to protect their children from textbooks they regard as hostile to their fundamentalist religion.

The objections these parents raise are easily the stuff of parodies. The parents object to the tale of ''Goldilocks'' because she is never punished for breaking and entering the bears' house. They object to the dance around the burning wolf in ''The Three Little Pigs'' because it promotes witchcraft.

On the first day of testimony, Vicki Frost, a mother, was on the stand for hours, cataloging the myriad ways in which the textbooks violated her religious beliefs: pacifism and internationalism, Satanism and humanism. A seventh-grade reader called on children to use their imagination, ''the powerful and magical eye inside your head.'' This, said Frost, was an ''occult practice.''

But the emotions and the issues behind this trial are not so easy to dismiss. They have come up in controversies over evolution. They will come up again in a similar case in Alabama this fall.

The parents contend that forcing their fundamentalist children to read these textbooks is like forcing a black Muslim child to read white-supremacist literature. They demand an alternative reading list of religiously ''correct'' books.

The court is asked: How much does a school system have to cater to the beliefs of a minority? We are asked again: What is the job of a public school in a society? Is it to pass on the viewpoints of parents, or of communal knowledge? Is it the parents' curriculum or the educators'? How do we decide? That question was easier when parents, teachers and school board members were integrated parts of a like-minded community. It was easier when minorities, like many of our immigrant grandparents, acceded to majority values. But we are witnessing the courtroom drama of a more splintered society. Parents are more skeptical of experts, more concerned about the influence of ''outsiders,'' whether they be television producers or textbook publishers.

It has become harder to hold the center of society and certainly harder to hold it in the classroom. Harder to balance respect for differences with common goals, even the goal of an educated adult. We've seen that in the argument over bilingual education and we see it now in the argument for bi-, tri-, quadri-religious education.

Debates over education are fierce ones because they are debates over our children. We have traditionally dealt with these issues by finding compromises and agreeing to live with some disagreement.

But having lost the battle in their community, these parents plea in court for separatism. In a chilling piece of testimony, Frost said that her religious belief did not allow for religious tolerance: ''We can not be tolerant of religious views on the basis of accepting other religions as equal to our own.''

Theirs is not a case for religious freedom, but for religious teaching in the public schools. If fundamentalists win the fight for alternative textbooks, so will Catholics, Lutherans, Muslims. Public school will be nothing more than a roof covering a thousand religious tutors. And all that will be left of the math teaching will be a lesson in multiple division.